New recordings from old Keystone club

Keystone collected: Shows taped on cassette at renowned club, saved for decades, being released

Jesse Hamlin

Updated 3:14 pm, Thursday, March 21, 2013

Photo: John Abbott 2002

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Todd Barkan (right) with Roland Hanna. Barkan put together Keystone's shows until the club folded in 1983. Now Resonance Records is releasing "The Magic of 2: Live at Keystone Korner."

Todd Barkan (right) with Roland Hanna. Barkan put together Keystone's shows until the club folded in 1983. Now Resonance Records is releasing "The Magic of 2: Live at Keystone Korner."

Photo: John Abbott 2002

New recordings from old Keystone club

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Todd Barkan had a gift for putting together unexpected and inspired shows at Keystone Korner, the storied North Beach jazz club that produced many unforgettable nights before it folded in 1983 after a tenacious 11-year run. High on the list you'd have to put the February 1982 pairing of Tommy Flanagan and Jaki Byard, two great pianists with very different styles. Playing opposite each other at grand pianos on the small Keystone stage, they set the place spinning with their propulsive swing, interplay and invention.

The joy of those performances and the exuberant vibe of that place come across wonderfully on "The Magic of 2: Live at Keystone Korner," which Resonance Records releases April 9.

"This project took 30 years," says Barkan, 66, by phone from his home in New York, where he booked Dizzy's Club Coca-Cola at Jazz at Lincoln Center for eight years before leaving last fall. He'd recorded the Byard-Flanagan performances - as he did with most of the Keystone shows, except when the artist declined - on cassette tapes.

Some great live Keystone recordings have been digitally transferred and released over the years, including two big boxes of Bill Evans and three Dexter Gordon discs. But it wasn't until Resonance offered to put out this one - nicely packaged with photos and extensive notes by Barkan, jazz critic Dan Morgenstern and others - that Barkan was finally able to share performances that he's listened to regularly at home for three decades.

"The music is more mind-blowing to me now than when I first heard it," says Barkan, who's now booking a Keystone series at the Iridium club in Manhattan. "There's a lot of excellent playing now, but it's not as common as it was 20 years ago to find this type of passionate, exhilarating and consistently brilliant music being played for 60 to 70 minutes. The mental telepathy going on between these two artists with almost diametrically opposed styles - the way they adapted and created spontaneous music together - was amazing. There was some real alpha-wave s- going on there," Barkan adds with a laugh.

Flanagan, the elegant bopper whose exquisite touch is heard here on a solo version of Billy Strayhorn's "Something to Live For," died in 2001, two years after Byard, whose wild, encyclopedic style encompassed stride piano and free improvisation. You hear it all in his solo ride through Stevie Wonder's "Send One Your Love," and in the dancing give-and-take with Flanagan on standards like "Just One of Those Things."

As beloved as they were by jazz fans and fellow musicians, neither Flanagan nor Byard ever sold many records. "You put out a record like this as a labor of love, with the expectation you many never get your investment back," says Barkan, who praises Resonance for its commitment. "How many people do that?"

What made Keystone special - the late Stan Getz likened place to a jazz church - was the connection between artists and audiences that can "take the music a little higher, to another dimension. All the people who worked there - the janitor, the bartenders, the waitresses - were deep into the music. People hung on every note. They were physically and spiritually involved with the music," adds Barkan, who's hoping to release other live Keystone recordings on Resonance by Getz, Gordon and organist Jimmy Smith.

A poet's snapshots

The late Allen Ginsberg took a lot of snapshots of his famous Beat-era friends in the 1950s and '60s, among them Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and William S. Burroughs. He came across the pictures in the '80s, reprinted the images that recorded "certain moments in eternity" and wrote inscriptions on them. About 80 go on view at San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum on May 23 in "Beat Memories: The Photographs of Allen Ginsberg," organized by the National Gallery of Art. For more information, go to www.thecjm.org.

'Acid Test' encore

Lynne Kaufman's play "Acid Test: The Many Incarnations of Ram Dass," which got a thumbs-up from Chronicle Theater Critic Robert Hurwitt when it opened at the Marsh in Berkeley four months ago, starts a five-week run at the San Francisco Marsh on April 12. Warren David Keith plays Ram Dass. More information at www.themarsh.org.

Brubeck festival

Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra play Friday night at Dave Brubeck's alma mater, University of the Pacific in Stockton, as part of this year's Brubeck Festival tribute to the jazz giant who died in December. The Brubeck Brothers Quartet, featuring the pianist's sons Chris (bass, trombone) and Dan the drummer, plays Saturday. For tickets and information, go to www.brubeckinstitute.org.

Stucky premiere

Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Steven Stucky, in residence with the Berkeley Symphony, will be at Zellerbach Hall on March 28 when the orchestra and tenor Noah Stewart premiere his "The Stars and the Roses." Maestra Joana Carneiro will also conduct Bruckner's Symphony No. 4 to close out the symphony's subscription season. More information at www.berkeleysymphony.org.